Arts & Entertainment
'Bottom of 33rd' Is A Hit For Local Writer
Maplewood's Dan Barry, The New York Times columnist who travels around each week to tell a country's stories, will duck into Words at 5 p.m. today to sign copies of his book about life and the longest baseball game in history.
Maplewood gets a chance to glimpse a local celebrity today when The New York Times columnist — and Maplewood resident — Dan Barry stops in at for a stretch to read from and sign his new book "Bottom of the 33rd: Hope, Redemption, and Baseball's Longest Game."
The book has critics cheering: "Dan Barry has written a wrenching, entertaining book summing up the exhilaration and heartbreak of baseball in one 33-inning game in Pawtucket, R.I.," wrote Colin McEnroe of The Colin McEnroe Show. Monica Rhor of the Associated Press gushed that Barry writes in "prose that echoes of Walt Whitman." Steven Fatsis of The New York Times wrote that Barry "exploits the power of memory and nostalgia with literary grace and journalistic exactitude. He blends a vivid, moment-by-moment re-creation of the game with what happens to its participants in the next 30 years."
Despite all the lavish praise, the two-time Pulitzer finalist was still humble enough to play along for a little Patch Q&A. After promising to "dodge these questions as best I can," Barry answered with what might be the best eight paragraphs to ever grace this Patch. If the book is anywhere near as good as his responses, it should sell faster than peanuts and cracker jacks.
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When do you find time to write books while writing for The New York Times?
I researched and wrote the book between writing columns for The New York Times. I write a column called "This Land," in which I basically just wander the country — with no complaints from my family — looking for stories to tell: the effect of the recent Alabama tornadoes on one family; a visit with a man who has played Jesus in a Florida Passion Play for the last 25 years; a look at mountaintop removal in West Virginia, and how it led to the elimination of a small village. Sometimes happy, sometimes not so.
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Meanwhile, I used to live in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, which is how I came to know about the longest game in baseball history, played in April 1981 in a broken-down Depression-era ballpark in the struggling mill city of Pawtucket. The Rochester Red Wings and the Pawtucket Red Sox played 32 innings, into Easter Sunday morning — more than eight hours of baseball — before the game was finally suspended. It was cold, miserable, absurd, and tested the theory that a baseball game could last forever. Nineteen people were in the stands.
They began the 33rd inning two months later, that June, in the middle of a major league baseball strike. Now the entire baseball-hungry nation turned its eyes to poor Pawtucket, and this historic game. It ended about 18 minutes later. Some famous ballplayers were in that game, including two future Hall of Famers, Wade Boggs and Cal Ripken Jr., but I was more interest in the other guys, especially the ones who never made it to the major leagues. So, while I wandered around the country for the Times, I'd call upon some of these men to ask them about that night, their hopes, and whatever had become of them.
In the end, I wanted to write about America — the hopes and striving of its people — and this baseball game provided what I thought could be a perfect prism.
I'm guessing you're a big baseball fan. So which major league team do you root for?
I am a baseball fan, and I played for many years, until I developed a career-ending condition called Lack of Talent. I grew up rooting for the Yankees, but when I was a kid in the mid-60s, they were about the worst team in baseball. Now, it seems, I wander around, rooting for underdogs — the Mets, the Red Sox, certain rust-belt-city teams — until they win, and I am forced to find a new underdog. I'm also drawn to minor leagues games, because there always seems to be an undercurrent of tragedy, of poignancy, rooted in the knowledge that not everyone on the field will reach the career goal of the major leagues.
Have you read T.C. Boyle's "The Hector Quesadilla Story" about a never-ending baseball game? Was that an inspiration to do this book?
I haven't read "The Hector Quesadilla Story" by T.C. Boyle. I guess my influences have been all over the place, from "The Boys of Summer," by Roger Kahn, to "Let The Great World Spin," by Colum McCann. I wanted the book to be dreamlike. I wanted to play with the concept of time: making the longest game even longer, in a way, by moving back and forth in time. Here's Sam Bowen, for example, striding to the plate. And before he takes his first swing, you know his past, his future, his hopes — the what will become of him — and then here comes the pitch.
Many have talked about the grand role of baseball in American life. I had a college history professor who taught a course on how baseball reflected all the major social changes in American life. And then there's Ken Burns. Discuss!
I think that's true, to a certain extent. In this game, for example, if the public address announcer had called out the home towns of all these players, rather than their names, it would have been a kind of national anthem — from housing projects in Chicago to farms in the deep South; from the suburbs of southern California to mill towns in New England. All there; all about striving.
Do you have kids? Do they play baseball?
I'm blessed with two girls, though neither plays baseball or softball — at least not yet. Soccer and gymnastics and dance and piano have come first — so far. I aim to change that (not really).
Dan Barry will be reading and signing at Words Bookstore in Maplewood Village on Saturday, May 7, at 5 p.m. Find out more about Barry and "Bottom of the 33rd: Hope, Redemption, and Baseball's Longest Game" at danbarryonline.com.
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